Saturday, 28 December 2013

The 2013 Scorecard

2013 was an interesting year for me on the writing front, mostly because I followed the lead of Shane Jiraiya Cummings and Hugh Howey, and tried self-publishing through Amazon and Smashwords with far greater success than I could have imagined when I first set out.

Despite the naysayers of the established pros and the fear self-publishing is generating in the world today, I think it is a great opportunity for writers, offering more than one path to success in the industry. I've been able to release collections of my science fiction, weird fiction and reboot my Harrison Peel spies versus the Cthulhu Mythos series, as well as working with various authors to develop sampler books of our works. I've also been able to work with Albedo One to get their magazine out in Kindle and ePub versions too. The reach to my audience has dramatically improved and I'm getting more positive reviews than I've ever had.

If you are sitting on the fence with self-publishing, I'd suggest the worst that will happen if you do is that no one will read your book or review it, and that's no worse of than where you are right now. Even if you only get bad reviews they help, because readers disagree with reviewers and buy it anyway. Reviewers, if you don't want a book to sell, say nothing.

The other fantastic news this year was that I was asked to become Art Editor with Albedo One magazine, and was able to help the team now led by Robert Neilson and Frank Ludlow to produce issue 44, with some very excellent tales included within. Robert, Frank and the rest of the team have been very supportive of my writing over the years, and it is an honour to join the team in a more senior capacity, after years as a reviewer.

Okay, here are the publications. The following ebooks were released this year:

"The Dream Quest of a Thousand Cats" in The Nightmare Dimension (Amazon Direct Publishing)

The following books I edited and were released this year:

Undead & Unbound with Brian M. Sammons and published by Chaosium

Extreme Planets with David Kernot and Jeff Harris is at the printers but won't be out until 2014, so it doesn't yet make the list.

I had lots of reprints for 2013 most in my ebooks, but of note was "Subtle Invasion" appearing in Best Tales of the Apocalypse edited by D.L. Snell and Bobbie Metevier, which makes this the third time the story has appeared in a "Best of" collection. The other was "The Masked Messenger" with John Goodrich appearing in issue 22 of Lovecraft eZine.

As I said before, I contributed to launching the Australian Horror Writers Sampler 2013 and the Cthulhu Mythos Writers Sampler 2013, both of which have been a great success in promoting all the authors involved. I was also Art Editor for Albedo One #44. I also wrote "The Jermyn Horror" and with Peter Gilham "The Crystal of Chaos" appearing in the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game book, The House of R'lyeh.

2014 will see my short stories in the anthology Extreme Planets, and the magazines Albedo One and Lovecraft eZine, and a chapter in the forthcoming reprint of the classic role-playing game, Horror on the Orient Express. I will also be releasing more Harrison Peel collections starting with Book 3: The Elder Codex.

Thanks to everyone who has supported my writing this year, especially to reviewers who go a long way in making a writer become noticed. Special thanks to David Kernot, who as always has been a great sounding board on my writing.

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About David

David Conyers is an Australian science fiction author residing in Adelaide. His fiction has appeared in Jupiter, Book of Dark Wisdom, Midnight Echo, Antipodean SF, and Andromeda Spaceways as well as a dozen anthologies published world wide including ‘best of’ collections.
He is the co-author of the novel The Spiraling Worm with John Sunseri and editor of the horror anthology Cthulhu’s Dark Cults, both published in the United States. David has been a multiple nominee for the Aurealis, Australian Shadows and Ditmar Awards. He won the Australian Horror Writers Association’s Flash Fiction Award in 2007 and was shortlisted for the Aeon Award in the same year.
He recently joined Albedo One, Ireland’s magazine of speculative fiction, as a regular reviewer and is currently editing Cthulhu Unbound 3 with Brian M. Sammons for Permuted Press.